


world war three (when are you coming for me?)

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 00:17:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Nobody asks her why she wants to work on a ship. Nobody needs to ask questions like that here, because the answers are all a variation on the same thing. Everything is broken, and I want out.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Joan leaves America because there's nothing left for her, and Sherlock is sick and broken and used up. A dystopic AU with sci-fi elements. Complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	world war three (when are you coming for me?)

Newfoundland: fog and air cold enough to hurt your teeth. The smell of the coal the people burn to keep warm. Wet wool. Joan has a ten-foot square room above a pub. She places her memdisk reader on the desk and turns the lens up without focussing it and leaves the window open so the seaside smells of salt and rotten fish and ammonia bleed into the room. She reads a lot. At night she lets a slideshow of New York play against the ceiling, pictures of smiling jaundiced children from the Party-sponsored news. The Empire State Building, policemen in day-Glo uniforms walking along the empty subway tracks. Home.  

The pub owner must have good Party connections, because the chemical-grassy smell of synthetic THC drifts into her room all night long, conversations drifting out onto the street long past dawn. Joan scrapes together the last of her stash of synthetic and puts an album of antique medical diagrams on, because they calm her, the invisible map of veins and bones that she can feel beneath her own skin. She puts it in the pipe and breathes in once, hard, and then -- nothing, there's nothing, she can feel herself bleeding into it.   

...

Time goes slowly here. Four weeks, that’s how long she’s been here. Two weeks, that’s another, how long her money will last, how long she can keep herself in food and oblivion and four bare walls. That’s if she isn’t noticed, and she won’t be. It has been six months since she tasted meat, a year since she last had sex (a hurried fumble in the room he rented, before he left for basic training. He sent memdisks from Wisconsin but told her to burn them, then they stopped, and well, he was just a boy, you can’t hold on to everything, you have to let go).

She is six weeks’ sail from England, and it has been six years since the Fall, four years since she gave up her post at the hospital for treating the inguinal hernia of the son of a political dissident.  

(Of course she wants to let go).

The dean told her that if she didn't resign she would Start To Be Of Notice, and Being Of Notice is generally the first thing that happens to you before you Go On A Watchlist then Disappear. She resigned and found locum work and that dried up, too, and she grew more and more tired of the city, of the whispers and glances, of the way people cast their eyes downward when a policeman walked through the subway carriage, nightstick banging against his thigh.

Nobody asks her why she wants to work on a ship. Nobody needs to ask questions like that here, because the answers are all a variation on the same thing. Everything is broken, and I want out.

…

In her bag: jeans and t-shirts and thermal undershirts. Three glass multiple-dose vials of Demerol. Books. A tube of lipstick, dented and small and expensive and still red. She had four vials of Demerol when she left New York, but she folded one into the hands of a Guard in Delaware. He had a listing sort of limp, his eyes were hungry for it, and when collecting bribes you must put need before greed.

(The penalty for the possession of one Class-A Narcotic without without medical licence or prescription: ten years, or your house, if you own one. The penalty for undisclosed possession of a circuit board or other electronic information equipment: death, no matter who your father is).

The most-read article on the Government’s news service this month: Treat Pain at Home, The Old-Fashioned Way. The most-read article on the Free Press memdisks that get dropped from planes over Manhattan and handed around tucked into books: You Are Not Alone.

...

Maps come at a premium, the ones that aren't Watermarked on the GPS system, and the captain -- a man with a red face and smart eyes and thick callused hands, Gregson he calls himself, so she assumes that's his name -- keeps his in the safe underneath a plastic sextant. The routes around the mines come at a high cost, men and women have died for them.

There are too many stories of loss and disintegration back there on the mainland, and she notices without appearing to notice that Gregson has the burn marks from a Neural on the back of his right hand. He tells her that he keeps a tight ship, that he tolerates drink but not drunkenness (she later learns that drunkenness is a flexible term), asks her if she can operate during a storm. Yes, she says.

The last doctor they had died of bleeding, the cook tells her in dialect. Clapped his hands to his throat and coughed and died, Gregson tells her. They took a collection for his wife. People pay good money for a place on a ship like this, because it's the only way to travel without approval. There's nothing out there but darkness and the red searching eyes of drones, so you bring a doctor and you pray to the Gods that belong to the burnt-out churches, back there on the mainland. You pray for a safe passage, that the ferryman you pay to take you ashore will be well-fed enough not to want to cut your throat and leave you to wash up on the stony beach.

Her medical kit is a Stanley tool box filled with scalpels and knives and crumpled blister packs of sample drugs. She has three sets of saline and IV tubing and two vials of morphine stamped with a government identifying mark. A twenty-year-old paper copy of Gray's Anatomy, a finger-smeared drop of blood on the corner of the page showing the appendix in relation to the viscera of the abdomen.

Her brother sends a letter from Vermont before she goes. The leaves are red this year, he says, it takes your breath away. My neighbor came back with an Implant and he looks like death. Do you remember when we used to walk across Central Park with dad, in the dusk?

He sends a celluloid memdisk, too, and she doesn't look at it because her brother has always been too cautious for his own good, because looking at it would only hurt. She wants to stay angry, so she tucks the letter in the back of her copy of Poe's stories (an unexpurgated edition she bought under the counter somewhere in New York, before she left -- the sky had been very red that day, and her head had hurt). She reads all night, and when she wakes up the next morning they're away from land.

...

The Englishman has a fever, they tell her. Joan has only seen him on deck once, walking shakily down the gangway with a book under his arm, wearing an ugly, lumpy coat. Up close he is thin and scattered and he has a dry nagging cough. His cabin is full of papers. His clothes are thin and dirty and unsuitable, patched with small precise stitches. A beaten-up memdisk reader, two precious ballpoint pens and a thick leather notebook. His pupils take up most of the iris.

"These bruises," she says, "You’ve been beaten badly in the last week, I'd say. With a nightstick."

"Uh. Yes. More than once."

He has that resigned sort of indifference to his body that a lot of people who've been treated in Camps have. His eyes dart a lot, too, and they seem to look through her. Thought harness. Synthetic opiates. Quartan fever, there's nothing that will fix that here. His shirt is two inches short at the cuff. A cigarette burn at the base of his thumb.

A bump under the skin, a rib broken and never set right. He flinches away from the stethoscope. He's thin and jumpy and sweaty and feverish, like a stray dog. The scar on the back of his neck turns her stomach.

"I thought a year and a half in a Camp was enough," he says. "Those places aren't about getting better, anyway. So I left."

"You escaped."

"Escaping is what you did when you left the mainland, Dr. Watson. I left under my own power."

"What's the difference?" she says, frowning, as she crushes an aspirin tablet in the dull bowl of a soup spoon, stirs it into water.

"I had to hurt people to leave under my own power."

She wonders if Gregson knows he's harbouring a fugitive, a potentially dangerous one, not just some two-bit fuel smuggler with a flash coat.

"And yes," he says, "the Captain knows."

She mixes him up a tonic for the fever, the only thing she has.

"You need to drink this," she says, and he leans across and spits it across the floor, wiping his mouth on the sheet. His voice is high and sardonic and strident, even now when he’s too weak to stand.

"Sherlock Holmes," he says. "I'm a detective, at least I was. I won't take anything unless I know what's in it. Aspirin and strawberry-flavoured acetaminophen, is that really the best you can do?"

He won't walk through a doorway unless the room is well-lit, either, and he balls his fists when he hears loud noises. A thin, broken little man, wearing a thin t-shirt under an inside-out Khaki shirt with Party insignia at the lapel. Oh yes. Joan knows how he got the bruises. He has scars on his knuckles, too.

But of course this is what comes to brilliant people now, this half-life of cheap black-market oblivion and sickness. Joan stands at the foot of the bed and shakes the mercury down in her thermometer. She used to see small, shrunken men and women lying on subway steps and on park benches in the sun, people like him with hunted eyes and proud voices. Maybe they went somewhere, maybe she didn't notice them any more.

...

He's often too sick to take meals in the Galley, so she brings him bowls of tepid tofu soup, the Memdisk printouts that come every day from the Free Press of Nor-America. He devours the news, rubbing absently at a spot on the side of his forehead until it's red. They're a week out from land, and apart from a spot on the horizon that had Bell scrambling for the Radar, there's been nothing.

He takes the tonic, now, and the fever has gone down.

"What exactly do you plan to do in England?" Joan says. "It'll be winter by the time we get there, and you need at least six weeks rest and recuperation and antibiotics before you can do anything like walk down the gangway without needing a rest."

"We've got four weeks," he says. "You better do your best. You are a surgeon, after all."

"How did you-"

"Your hands and your, uh. Your accent," he says. "I have four partial theories that would account for you finding work on what amounts to a pirate ship. Um. Crime, disgrace, debt, or addiction. Or a combination of all three--"

He makes sort of coughing noise at the back of his throat, then, and his hand twitches in his lap. His eyes drift toward her and away again, and he makes the coughing noise again. Joan takes out her watch, keeps one eye on the second hand as she takes his pulse. There's a tattoo of a constellation on his wrist. Further up his forearm: chemical formulae and initials in shaky grey ink.

"You had a complex partial seizure," she says an hour later. He’s post-ictal, his face turned toward the wall, idly tapping his folded pocket knife against the fingers of one hand. "Do you remember what they were giving you at the Medical Camp? Did you ever have a generalised seizure?”

"They filmed it, but I don't remember having much medicine," he says shortly, and he closes his eyes.

I was the star of the Hudson Valley Series of Neurology training movies, he tells her later. I was a good performing dog, and I got no kicks in the side for my trouble, only orderlies who were scared for their lives and armed guards who wished they were somewhere else.

Journal Articles a doctor friend passed to her on memdisk, the contents unredacted: Long Term Effect of Cerebral Harnessing on Electrical Impulses in the Hippocampus, a Case Study. Brain Recovery After an Adverse Cerebral Stimulation Event, A Case Study.

...

Ty had volunteered for a Harness group in college, before it all got too mysterious, before there were things in the press about bodies buried behind experiment huts out in the desert, before there were dead investigative reporters and a new government and no more stories.

"It's like nothing, nothing on Earth," he had said. "It's like every nerve ending in your body is on fire, like you can see everything. Everything makes sense. You can remember the pattern on the curtains in the dining hall from summer camp when you were five. You flex and you can remember the way the light played across them. A parabolic arc in a baseball."

He had taken a gulp of the watery-tasting wine she bought at the Bodega, opened his mouth and taken a deep breath and closed it again.

"They let me in because of my GPA, but I always told the Sergeant that they shouldn't have done that, that instead of Harnessing all the smart college kids they should be out there looking for the strong ones, looking for the ones who wanted to find something, looking for the ones who could stand it."

She wanted to ask him more, but got up and closed the curtains and put on some music, his mouth a flat line. He was head of surgery at the military hospital in Manhattan, now. She wonders what secrets he had to swallow to get there. If he'll be debriefed if they catch her.

Catch me for what, she thinks as she breaks a paracetamol tablet in half for the only child on the ship, the child of a couple who are young and scared and who probably said the wrong thing when they were drinking in a bar somewhere, or buying a newspaper. But she doesn't know. She doesn't know what they'll catch her for.

...

"You read too much in low light," she tells him. "You need to avoid stimulation, do the Gamma-wave exercises."

"I did a year in Harness," he tells her. "Gamma-wave exercises do jack shit, to use one of your delightful Nor-American phrases."

A year, Joan thinks. She treated a man in her last year of med school, really the last good year she had. Six months had broken him. The most they ever officially allow is two months. Maybe another two, after recovery time and neurological testing.

His eyes had been the same as Sherlock's, searching, restless, watery in strong light. From the mask, she supposes, or maybe the constant REM.

"Oh," she says. "I had no idea it was that long."

He puts his head to the side, cups his chin in the palm of his hand. There’s a strong slanted beam of light coming through his porthole, and she watches as he moves his other hand through and around it.

He seems to drink things in. Sensations, scraps of information. A machine, she thinks, and pushes that thought away half-formed, because to call a man like this a machine would be a gross injustice. Harness Projects turn men like him into machines, suck the marrow out of them. But what escapes, broken, is no machine.

"I've become your project. You can't stand it. That's why you were fired, wasn't it? You couldn't stand somebody getting away with something, somebody else not getting the treatment that they needed."

"I--" Something rolls in Joan's stomach, and she wishes she had THC. "I'm sorry," she says, because she doesn't want to know this, doesn't want to know that this man spent a year of uptime harnessed to a fucking Cray-10 supercomputer. What was it? The booking system for an airline? Some grad student’s protein structure? Did he sit around in some sunny little dormitory on his downtime, like in the films they project on buses and in supermarkets? _Thought Harness is the Key to Your Future: and His!_

" _Sorry_ ," he says, and there's so much hate in his voice, so much self-reproach. "You -- You bleed from the ears, did you know that? They never put that in the recruitment brochures in the bus stations and the fucking Employment Centres. You bleed from your ears, sometimes, and your nose bleeds as well, and you wake up struggling to bring to mind your own name, and then they give you a, a sleeping pill, a phenobarbital and you do it all over again."

There's a short, dense silence as he takes a pull on the pipe -- he uses it openly in front of her now, and she can smell the tarry-sweet smell of it on her clothes when she gets undressed at night.

"I still miss it. The clarity. It was like nothing, nothing else."

He talks in his sleep. He repeats the same word over and over. Moriarty.

...

Her doctor's cabin is so quiet, and the noise of ten thousand bottles of you-know-what (Rye whisky, maybe, the currency of low-level bribes all over the world because it's filtered for lead and Volatile Organic Compounds) sloshing around in the hold underneath her is too unnerving. She takes mugs of coffee to Sherlock's cabin at night, and if the flickering yellow light of his reader shows under the door, she goes in. Sometimes he lies all day with a sweater tied loosely around his face, and then she knows to leave his food at the door and go.

"It's quiet," she says. "They told me that there were lots of drones around this time of year. I was expecting more..."

"More heat?" Sherlock chuckles drily, coughs into his closed fist. The fever came again two nights ago, and he spent a day arching his back, sweaty sheet clamped in his fist, delirious, reciting chemical formulae and the names of dead world leaders. There will be chloroquine in England. The will be medicine in England. It will be cold and damp and it will smell like woodsmoke.  

"Yeah," Joan says. "They said there'd be pirates."

"I'm a pirate," Sherlock says.

She sits with him all night, lets him ask questions about medicine and poisons until his eyes flick beneath the lids, his arms folded.

…

Two weeks out, Gregson says. They stand leaning against the railing, Sherlock squinting, flicking a fingernail against the metal. They take shifts scanning for drones using radar and binoculars. Sherlock does it for twenty minutes at a time, his eyes streaming.

“I was in a Crime project,” he tells her. “Crime scene visualisations. Connections. Things like that. Everything was always connected, in the end. I liked that. When it all made sense, after I laid every bit of evidence out in a line.”

He lights a cigarette, then lets one hand wander up to his temple, run his fingers absently through his hair at the occiput of his skull, as if he could reach through.

“After my six months of Uptime had expired, I went home. But I couldn’t get her out of my mind, so my father paid a bribe to make them take me back. I thought I could beat her, I thought I could take it. They packed me off over here, some sort of international goodwill thing. They can’t really parade you around like a hero if you can barely speak, I suppose.”

“What will you do when you get back to Britain?”

“Lead a low-key life. Find her.”

“What about getting better?”

“What use would that be, without the answer, Watson?”

The dormitories were segregated along sex lines, even though some of them presented in the opposite sex when they were in harness (that sort of thing doesn't go with the public, he tells her with a wry grin, so they don't put it in the flexidisks, but the neurologists don't care if you present as a bloody circus clown if you can work), but they generally lay down and slept wherever there was a spare bed and silence. It was a splintery Victorian sort of place, lots of quiet corners, grime. Graffiti and sweet hash smell in the toilets. Out of the way, but you felt scrutinised. More than one man told him with wide-open bloodshot eyes that there were Government monitoring devices in the light fittings.

…

When they make love he closes his eyes. I can’t stand it, he says, it’s too fucking much. Come here, just touch me, Jesus, Watson, Joan. Too much, he says. It’s too much of everything, I can’t I can’t.

He repeats this word like a mantra. His hands, cold and shaky. Your hands, your hands, Joan thinks, because she wants to understand him, because she wants to know what it’s like.

When he comes he presses his mouth hard against hers. He doesn't speak for a long time.

…

There was a white room, he tells her. Art on the walls, things I’d never seen. Arms crossed, fingers worrying at the sleeve of his shirt. It was all wrong, he says. The shape of his fingers around the gun, the blood splatters. It was all wrong.

She starts to weave her own story around his breathless stumbling sentences, the way he stops to make diversions about the feel of a pair of sheets or the way sun glanced off water.

New York before the Fall was beautiful, she tells him. Medicine is like solving problems, too, trying things until they work. They have a bitter sort of secret code, the things that younger children never remember: Top-40 loudspeaker transmissions, street vendor meat.

Lying next to him, in the dark, he whispers to her. You make me feel whole. And she doesn’t say a word.

…

“Tell me you won’t go under again, you won’t let them harness you.” _Tell me you won't ask for it_ , she meant to say.

He clears his throat. Pictures on his memdisk reader: green snow in the Caucasus, a three-headed calf born in Cumbria, a crime scene in New York.

“Don’t make me promise, Watson, I don’t like to lie.”

Why would you let them break you, she wonders, but of course she knows the answer. They’re all broken, and what is all this, the rust and the patches and the shakes you get from the narcotics, what is that compared to light seen through curtains, frost in the corner of a window, the feel of grass against your feet, living those moments again, complete and utter clarity?

“I’m coming to London, then,” Joan says, quietly, into the darkness.

“Of course,” Sherlock Holmes says, and there’s something laughing and ragged in his voice, “Of course you are, Watson.”

Sudden silence, ringing in her ears. The engines are off.

“Do you think--”

“He’s sighted a drone,” Sherlock says. “If he knows they have a lock, he’ll have to shoot it down, but they’ll send more after that. So you turn off the engine and wait.”

“Should we do something?”

“No,” Sherlock says. “Don’t worry, we’re safe. I’m a pirate, remember?”

They drift there, lying close but not touching, breathing softly in the silence. As if they might break it if they moved.

**Author's Note:**

> [Nomad1328](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nomad1328/pseuds/nomad1328) positively scintillates as a beta, as always. All mistakes are my own. Title from [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbO2Eh_SJj4).


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